Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.
The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.
What the public wants is called ‘politically unrealistic.’ Translated into English, that means power and privilege are opposed to it.
Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.
These are questions for action, not speculation, which is idle.
The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.
What’s the point of being better than someone else?
There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism.
For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.
It’s very common for the victims to understand a system better than the people who are holding the stick.
Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena.
As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less.
States are not moral agents.
If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.
You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.
The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
Governments don’t control people like they used to.
In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.